Pencil is the name of a new stylus coming from FiftyThree, the makers of the rather lovely Paper app for iPad. If the hardware shown in the FCC filing is anything to go by, then it is a design as practically minimal as the Paper app.

The Pencil looks more like a carpenters pencil than the usual cylindrical pen-shaped styluses out there, and this makes it both easy to grip and stops it from rolling away. The Pencil will use low-powered Bluetooth, and will doubtless be very tightly integrated with the app.

The other neat feature, clearly seen in the mugshot above, is the inclusion of a USB plug on the top of the Pencil. It’s slimline, just like those neat USB sticks the cooler companies use to give out press info at trade-shows, and means that you only have to jam it eraser-end first into a nearby USB port to charge it. Ingenious.

I’ve switched back to paper for the few things I need to joy down, as it’s usually easier to grab a scrap of dead tree and find a pen or pencil than it is to fire up my iPad, tap in a passcode, find an app, launch that app before trying to remember what it was I wanted to write down in the first place. Anything that needs to be kept and indexed can be fed into a Doxie or Evernote.

That said, I’m excited to see just how FiftyThree incorporates a stylus into the Paper app.